How We Talk War When We Talk With China Now

Admiral Mike Mullen, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sounded a worried note in his New York Times op-ed on Tuesday on the state of Chinese-American military relations. It was a typically one-sided presentation of the situation: those spying, secretive, bullying, and increasingly well-armed Chinese versus a U.S. that’s only trying to keep the regional peace… while selling arms at a record pace to every neighboring state, conducting joint naval exercises right off China’s coast, and, you know, openly planning to bomb the breadth and length of the Middle Kingdom.

Details!

But these are the same old gripes that have bedeviled the bilateral military relationship for years now, keeping it frighteningly stillborn — at least relative to the immense buildup of economic connectivity between our countries in just the last decade. Admiral Mullen is right to be depressed about this uneven state of affairs, because typically it’s the military-to-military relationship that’s steadier than the financial one. Usually, it’s the “glue” that survives the petty political flare-ups and nagging economic disagreements, but here it’s the frequent victim of such squabbles and that should make both sides nervous.

Why? Besides all those trillions of U.S. dollars sitting in Beijing’s coffers, there’s the historic argument about how the international system always has a hard time integrating a rising global power — especially when the longtime “sole superpower” is in relative decline. (And we’ll see how relative that is come default D-day.) But since America and its military actually are the force for good around this planet, we want to continue doing the right thing while asking China to step up and help — instead of just “free riding” on our global policing efforts. But because we’re a rather nervous Number One right now, we want to keep a wary eye on everything China does with its military, while keeping our big-war powder dry.

In short, Washington can’t make up its our mind on China — the “threat” version, anyway — and so it seeks to have it both ways by brandishing sticks and carrots. Unsurprisingly, single-party-state China returns the favor, and for some reason, that perplexes our leadership! The Pentagon finds Beijing oddly schizophrenic in the generals-to-generals realm, when, of course, Washington itself consistently presents any number of contradictory strategic personalities, talking out of all sides of its mouth at once.

Here’s my rundown of the six major approaches that America currently employs to deal with Chinese military might. See if you can spot the internal inconsistencies.

1. The Knock-Off Stalemate

For some reason, the Chinese military is super-secretive. It simply doesn’t want to advertize its technological and operational shortcomings to the world’s uber-battle-tested military superpower. Go figure! Instead, it spends a lot of its time trying to steal Number One’s best military technologies, which it then regurgitates in “new” platforms that look suspiciously like knock-offs of America’s most fearsome weapons systems — like that fifth-generation stealth fighter jet that the People’s Liberation Army just so happened to unveil during a recent visit by Robert Gates.

Sometimes these efforts are hilariously self-contradictory in their own right, like when the Chinese military trots out its new design for an aircraft carrier while simultaneously letting it slip that it’s testing a new “carrier killer” missile. Hmm, such an inscrutable combination. Sort of like coming out with the ultimate in body armor and the latest-and-greatest in armor-piercing bullets… at the same time!

But frankly, expecting the People’s Liberation Army to stop behaving in this way — so long as the Pentagon explicitly plots its future big-war capabilities against those of the Chinese — is simply unrealistic. China’s military won’t go transparent until it’s demonstrably better than the U.S. military — a situation that’s inconceivably hard to imagine given Beijing’s reluctance to use its military anyway except off its shore, which gets me to America’s second face….

2. The (False) Supply and (Big) Demand

Washington doesn’t need a “containment” strategy for China; China sets one in motion all by its lonesome. Every time Beijing starts bullying its smaller neighbors with its unreasonable claims on the South China Sea, you can just hear the West’s military-industrial complex’s cash registers start ka-chinging. China’s neighbors have collectively doubled their arms purchases in the last half-decade — a totally delightful tonic for an American defense industry facing tighter Pentagon budgets.

Then there’s the Pentagon’s new AirSea Battle Concept — basically a big-war wish list for our Navy and Air Force, both of which have long felt budgetarily slighted by the boots-on-the-ground-centric “long war” against radical Islam. Sure, at least we’re transparent about our military goals (you can actually find defense think-tank maps on the Internet listing all the Chinese military facilities we plan to bomb in the opening days of the blitzkrieg-like war over Taiwan), but if your main goal here is to intimidate the Chinese military with your brilliant schemes, then why should you expect them to give in to your demands for transparency?

3. The Silent Partner

Washington doesn’t want you to know this, but the biggest beneficiary of the “war on terror” has been the Chinese. We take down the Taliban and a decade later, who’s made the biggest foreign direct investment in Afghanistan? The Chinese, of course, plopping $3 billion-plus of our exported capital on a giant copper mine. Then we take down Saddam in Iraq and guess whose national oil companies have contracts in both the Kurdish north and Arab south? Again, the dollar-gorged Chinese.

If you’re China, you have to love the American’s obsession with terrorism, because U.S. military efforts are making the world safe for Chinese resource plundering. I mean, why buy the cow when you can walk away with the milk — at zero military casualties?

4. The Cuban Confusion Crisis

Yes, we still regularly sell advanced weaponry to a small “break-away” island off China’s coast. We even have a law that mandates it — in so many words. Imagine China doing the same with Cuba, or conducting naval exercises with Venezuela and Mexico in the Gulf, or conducting military spy flights along the California coast. Simply put, we do things in China’s front yard that we’d never tolerate from anybody in our own, and if China pushes back at all, we label that provocative… and then sell that many more arms to all of its neighbors — you know, to keep things “balanced.”

5. The Eager Engager

And, yes, we do our best to try and draw the Chinese military into cooperative engagements elsewhere in the world, like in our multinational anti-piracy effort off the coast of Somalia (touted by Mullen). We’d also like China to fix North Korea for us, and lean on Tehran regarding its nuclear efforts, and make sure north Sudan doesn’t restart its civil war with fledgling South Sudan, and… the list goes on and on. We’ve got a lot of messes around the world where we’d like Chinese help. But guess what? When you’re all worried about America’s attempts to keep your military bottled up in East Asia, you kind of like the idea of Washington facing all sorts of intractable — and draining — military interventions elsewhere in the world. And so you’re not at all eager to lighten America’s global load.

6. The Clueless Bystander

China is easily the most active integrating agent in globalization today. Far and away, it’s the most dynamic force across both Central Asia and Africa, two regions into which this “long war” will logically flow as the forces of radical Islam continue to lose and/or grow more irrelevant across the Arab world. In both instances, the level of U.S. security cooperation with the Chinese is non-existent. We set up our Africa Command and pretend we run some sort of security show there, when it’s Chinese investment that’s revolutionizing the socio-economic landscape. Could our “chocolate” mix with their “peanut butter”? Of course it could — to the benefit of both, but look back over the five other strategic personalities we present to the Chinese and ask yourself why Beijing should stick its neck out anywhere when the U.S. seems so intent on containing China’s military rise back in Asia?

Don’t expect any of this to change any time soon. Our multiple-personalities approach has long been enshrined in the diplomatic “wisdom” of “separate tracks.” Simply put, Washington has no desire to engage in any significant horse-trading with Beijing. As such, expect the same mournful op-ed from the next outgoing Chairman four years hence.

1. Global warming alarmism: Predictions from the early global warming alarmists that the Earth was rapidly heating, and would suffer untold damage as this trend continued, have already failed to come true. There has been no discernible warming since the mid-1990s. Coupled with Climategate’s disclosures showing bias among key scientists, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s laughable report predicting melting Himalayan glaciers, with no evidence to back it up, it is hard to accept the global warming alarmists’ constantly changing theories as anything other than hysteria.

2. Earth Day: Earth Day’s solutions to save the planet often include calls for stricter government environmental regulations that would strangle the economy. The Washington Times was right when it editorialized several years ago that Earth Day has “anti-business overtones and [a] message of guilt and limits. … Earth Day is a global guilt-fest that views the future with a sense of dread. … Rather than increasing their productivity, people are told to decrease their carbon footprints.”

3. Cap and trade: The cap-and-trade legislation that failed last year in a Democratic-controlled Congress was a maze of environmental regulations that would have resulted in lost jobs and an energy tax for the American people. The Heritage Foundation estimated the cap-and-trade bill would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020—$1,870 for a family of four, rising to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035.

4. Green jobs: By giving czar status to Van Jones, Obama chose an ex-Communist to come up with a plan to create green jobs. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about the economic viability of such a government-subsidized enterprise. Spain’s attempt at actualizing a green jobs revolution ended up costing the country more than $774,000 for each green job created, according to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.

5. Environment activism: Many environmental activists are as eager to denounce capitalism as they are to save the planet. Their activities are often aimed at preventing the development of abundant energy resources in the United States that would help the nation move toward energy independence.

6. Hollywood hypocrisy: The Lords of Malibu love to preach about saving Planet Earth from the evils of corporate America even while they dump tons of pollutants into the atmosphere from their high-octane cars and opulent mansions. Memo to Leonardo DiCaprio, Harrison Ford, and James Cameron: No more lectures about reducing our carbon footprint until you ground your private jets.

7. Wind power hypocrisy: Wind power is another environmental dream that has proven to be too expensive to be effective on a massive scale. And even environmentalists can’t agree on where wind projects should be located when it soils a pristine scene. Members of the Kennedy clan opposed Cape Wind, a wind energy project in Massachusetts, because it threatens the view of Nantucket Sound.

8. Carbon trading: The attempt to set up a system for trading carbon emission allowances to thwart global warming gave purveyors of alarmism a way to cash in on their hysterical ranting. Former Vice President and global warming guru Al Gore founded a private equity firm, Generation Investment Management, which trades in carbon offsets, and he made a fortune. He even purchases carbon credits from the company for his own personal use, which comes to $30,000 a year just for his posh Belle Meade mansion in Nashville, Tenn.

9. Greenwashing: Greenwashing is a term used to describe companies that use marketing to portray false claims that they are turning green. Usually these companies spend more on advertising than any real effort to save energy. The next time you see a hotel room sign promoting the reuse of towels to save the environment, recognize that it is just spin.

10. Al Gore: Al Gore transformed his movie An Inconvenient Truth into a mega-money maker (see No. 8). What is truly inconvenient about his Nobel Prize-winning film were the 11 falsehoods that it contained, as determined by a British court, including the misleading suggestion that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming.

Some people note that the chance of aliens finding the Golden Record is fantastically remote. The Voyager probes won’t come within a few light years of another star for some 40,000 years. What are the odds of making contact under such circumstances?

On the other hand, what are the odds of a race of primates evolving to sentience, developing spaceflight, and sending the sound of barking dogs into the cosmos?